How Not to Teach 179 to satisfy the teacher or at least to satisfy their own needs in these areas. The problem is, as I stated originally, that learning starts with a goal and that the students’ goals may not be the same as the teacher’s goals. Since the students have no Dickens-related goal, and actually have a teacher satisfaction goal, they simply have misestimated what will satisfy the teacher. Now let’s consider real goals. Students do not stop driving a car because they are tired even though they haven’t arrived where they are going. They do not fail to ask out Mary Lou on a date because they got bored talking mid-sentence. They do not give up on hitting a baseball mid-swing or midway through the game. People put in the effort required when they are working on truly held goals. Subject- based goals are almost never truly held. But cognitive process goals are nearly always truly held if the student is working on real things. If school wants to deal with artificial things (flying an air flight simula- tor instead of a real plane, for example, in order to learn to fly), then those artificial things need to feel very real and be very motivating. Rule #6: Try teaching students things they actually may need to know after they leave school. Here is mistake #7. Mistake# 7: Correcting a student who is doing something wrong by telling him what to do instead This one seems really weird. Wouldn’t you tell someone to do things differently or what went wrong when you see them making a mistake? Most of us would because this seems a reasonable thing to do. It just isn’t a reasonable thing for a teacher to do. A teacher needs to help a student think about what went wrong as opposed to telling him what went wrong and how to fix it. What do you think happened? Why did it happen, do you suppose? What could you have done differently? Why does this matter? It matters because self-generated explana- tions are remembered more easily than explanations that we are told. It actual